Tell Me Why

While some people love to chug a soft drink straight from the can, others prefer the taste from a bottle

While soft drink manufacturers state that they use the same recipe regardless of whether the soft drink is packaged in a can or bottle, there is no denying that ice-cold cola tastes different when you chug it from a can compared to drinking it from a bottle.

The aluminium cans have a polymer lining that can absorb some of the soft drink’s flavours, food chemist Sarah Risch tells Popular Science, potentially making the taste milder. If you are slugging your soft drink from a plastic bottle, Risch notes, the drink’s flavour may be altered by some of the acetaldehyde in the plastic transferring into the liquid.

Since glass bottles are basically inert, they’ll deliver a product very close to the original intent, experts tell Business Insider. One chemist states that the metal taste some people note from soft drink in cans may have more to do with their sensitivity to metal – they’re tasting the can as they put it to their lips, not a metallic taste that’s actually present in the cola.

A researcher from Harvey Mudd College who studies taste told Business Insider that other variables in flavour occur based on the sensitivity of someone’s tastebuds – some people can pick up extremely tiny differences. What’s more, the way the product is stored may alter flavour: light, temperature and time will also change the way your soft drink tastes.